#13: I intentionally wrote it out
I settle nicely into a routine. The moment I realize that my weeks are starting to look quite a bit alike is not usually the moment when I panic. I freak out when the internal stuff starts to feel like a broken record, when I'm having the same conversations with myself over and over and I can't seem to negotiate an out. But an external sameness is fine with me. My weeks lately look like this:
Monday: Reading day. Doing as much reading as I can for the week, usually trying to finish the novel I have to read for my Tuesday class or getting into the theory stuff for my Wednesday class. At night I put on The New Matt Show, a radio block on Drexel's WKDU station that's hosted by Matt Scottoline from the band Hurry. (Note: it appeared that The New Matt Show wasn't on this week, but thanks for playing Turnstile last week all the same.)
Tuesday: Writing day. Usually this is when I'm doing the bulk of my essay writing for all my classes, usually working from bad, messy drafts I've handwritten in notebooks. If I'm ahead of the game, I'll write an On Shuffle column or a review or maybe a newsletter (howdy).
Wednesday: Catching whatever I missed the last two days that wasn't urgent.
Thursday: Prepping for the class I literally teach (????) in the afternoon. Afterwards I usually enjoy one to two beers.
Friday: Doing the reading for the teaching practicum and figuring out everything I need to do for next week.
Saturday: Whatever the hell I want!!! This week I made pumpkin muffins and rode my bike down to center city where I read part of the book Storm by George R. Stewart while an actual storm seemed to be brewing in Rittenhouse. (Note—exploring these NYRB titles has been a lot of fun and I have a wishlist a mile long right now. Great cover design too. Here's a cool newsletter with more about those designs.)
Sunday: I clean our house in the morning and Nick and I usually do a long walk or head to the dog park. Usually I try to start my longest reading (this week it was The Argonauts, which was cool).
Drop in a gig or two and that's pretty much my week. I wonder if this makes me seem washed. Joke's on you, I've always been this way.
I sit down on Friday and I write down every reading I have to do for the next week, carefully noting in the margins the number of pages in each one so I know how best to approach them. This is when I get a grip on what I need to do. This is how I set up dominos to knock them down later.
I make my coffee in the morning and I sit in the silence while I wait for the water to boil. This is when I should be silent, should be unoccupied, shouldn't read or write or do anything. Just wait. (Only sometimes works out that way).
I turn the shuffle function on and I press play, listening to whatever song comes up first. This is how I know what to write about. All of these songs ended up here for a reason, all of them have reasons to share.
I have written over and over again how I need this perceived structure to thrive. How I keep myself going on little rituals of everyday living. If this newsletter has a theme or a focus...that's it. I Keep a Diary. I sit down each day and I do what I always do and hope that something lucid or true comes from keeping up the habit. The structure keeps me grounded for as long as it holds. It doesn't always hold for long. But while the scaffolding I've built stands firm—in between the building and the decay—that's when I'm happiest. And what's the harm in reveling in the happiness for just a little while?
My favorite album of the year so far is called Illusory Walls. It's by The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, a band that I've loved for a very long time now, one who, by my approximation, has written the most transcendent and life-affirming emo music of the last ten years, give or take a Hotelier. The title of the album is drawn from an element of the video game Dark Souls, with which I am not at all familiar, but the concept appears in a more general sense throughout the record. Containers, prisons, boxes, cages, Illusory Walls is full of four-walled imagery and closed-off spaces. Lines drawn around things.
"Our little box, this tiny room / there’s only room for me and you."
"The objects we’re locked in / immobile and violent"
"We’ve built a cage in getting old"
"Fed money through the bars / a career in trunks of cars"
You get the idea. Taken out of context, these lines aren't all that powerful to me. They read like paranoid but obvious truths—yeah, yeah, we're trapped in a prison of our own making whatever listen what's good on HBO Max right now (please watch The Other Two I'm serious). Divorced from their surrounding lines and their musical surroundings, they kinda just sound like downers. Most of us know we're fucked, but do we want to sit next to the person who won't stop telling us we're fucked while we're just trying to eat dinner in peace?
Thankfully, The World is a Beautiful Place is not that kind of band and Illusory Walls is not that kind of record. It's easy to go into this dense, grey piece of work and feel ready for some bummer post-rock—my first listen, I really thought we were getting one of the darkest records of the year.
But I forgot about the fundamental core of this band. I forgot about the stake they planted in the ground on their first record, their de facto manifesto:
The world is a beautiful place but we have to make it that way
Whenever you find home, we’ll make it more than just a shelter
And if everyone belongs there, it will hold us all together
If you’re afraid to die, then so am I
Thankfully, the band was kind enough to remind me. That passage appears again at the very end of their 20-minute tour de force of a closer "Fewer Afraid." This band has always been about constructing spaces that don't have firm walls, finding comfort in the uncertain configuration of now. And when they dredge those lines back up to the surface eight years after they first appeared on "Getting Sodas," they are not covered in grime or rust or undersea bile. Instead, they sound shiny and new. Emboldened. Joyous.
Illusory Walls is emboldened. Joyous. It was really something to teach Foucault's "Panopticism" to my students during the same week that this record landed in my inbox. I got 50 minutes into that class session talking about how power works and how it relates to surveillance real or imagined. How these things have so thoroughly created our world and all kinds of doomy shit about how there's no escape or whatever. I was being that person at the dinner, basically.
Finally, I stopped myself just at the last minute. "This sounds bleak. It is bleak," I said. "But imagine what you can do now that you know this, now that you can talk about it." (I doubt I was this eloquent but it was something like that. Also I was wearing sunglasses and doing kickflips).
The timeline is fuzzy, but I am pretty sure that I had listened to Illusory Walls for the first time a few days before that. And I think that final note was born from the band's ideas. Throughout Illusory Walls, shit is bleak. But the possibility of truly living in spite of the bleak world, of erasing pencil lines masquerading as brick and mortar where you can—for The World Is a Beautiful Place, those are triumphs. One of my favorite songs on the album is "Trouble," in which this divide between content (doomed) and feeling (triumph) is most evenly and clearly divided. The lyrics are bleak—that "fed money through the bars" line comes from this song, which seems to detail a shirking of responsibility by the powerful and a forceful ushering of the burden onto the backs of the people.
What else is comedy
but acceptance of the real
when you can’t afford the hospital
and the ground is all banana peels...
they called it a promise
clean yourselves of depression and anxiety
On paper, these lines look defeated. It looks like a lament. But the song itself sounds the opposite. It's a muscular, exultant anthem. It's a battle cry. It's fast, crunchy, with a nimble beating heart. A thick pop-punk riff punctures the song in the middle, giving rise to a climax—"They rose and shook. I barely stood. They rose and shook the blood off." On paper, it's easy to linger on the "barely" here. But in context...the fact that they stood at all is a miracle. A win.
I only showed you half of the album's key line that first appears in the magnificent, unreal "Infinite Josh." Here's the whole thing:
The objects we're locked in
Immobile and violent
Just fewer like that
Fewer afraid
For me, the word "just" reads like "but," and "that" refers not to the objects but to the subject of those objects, the people locked inside. Here, again, is an emboldened fighter in battle with a powerful force. The World Is a Beautiful Place dare to imagine what we can do, knowing what we now know.
You can check out my formal review of Illusory Walls on Slant if you're looking for more.
We got a little bit of sustainable autumn over the last week or so and as such I have been listening to some classics uhhh over and over and over. Here's what I've been hooked on lately:
The Photo Album turned 20 this last week. I don't need an excuse. This is my third favorite Death Cab album (after We Have The Facts and Transatlanticism and just before the underrated Narrow Stairs) but I think we have undervalued its real allure–The Photo Album is the catchiest Death Cab album. The hooks on this thing! This record is all earworms, A to Z. I was singing "I loved you Guinevere / I loved you, Guinevere, I loved you" all over Philadelphia this weekend. Sorry to everyone involved.
Abendrot. Abendrot. Abendrot. Difficult to think of an emo record in the last ten years that is more unfairly regarded. You Blew It's third record has stuck with me steadfastly since it came out and every time I put it on, my admiration for it deepens. It's kind of a strange record, a muted version of what they were doing on (the fantastic) Keep Doing What You're Doing, but the more I listen the more I feel like they were inching toward a bigger indie sound. Take "Greenwood's" spacious, ruminating rock for instance, shades of Transatlanticism shining through.
Couplet, on that note, is the self-titled album from YBI's new band. It's been an automatic spin for me the last few weeks whenever I can't decide what to put on. It's been said, but Postal Service and American Analog Set influences feel strong on this one—but it also feels like it still tugs at some of the same threads that Abendrot teased. Another muted indie rock album with songs that feel like they grow larger and bolder as time goes on.
Alligator. Ok I was also singing "Karen" and "Baby, We'll Be Fine" while I rode around the city on Saturday. Also I like to pick up my dog and sing "Mr. November" to him. I don't know why.
Laura Stevenson. This is probably my number two pick for album of the year right now. It's really starting to settle in now that the weather is turning. The lyrics on this thing are some of the best of her career, no easy feat. "Shana says to take the year / Shutter up, keep your head down, don't let it strip you bare / And maybe I'll be better in a year / And maybe I'll deserve it then." Lines like that have been ringing through my brain static for months.
This Is Not The Way I Wanted You to Find Out is the debut EP from Mt. Oriander, the new project from Empire! Empire!'s Keith Latinen. It picks up right where their incredible finale You Will Eventually Be Forgotten left off—it felt like a true homecoming to hear those Mineral-inspired guitars poke through Latinen's narrative storytelling again. Perfect as always for the slightest chill.
I feel it may seem like I'm overstating autumn for those readers who may be in Philly. Remember that I grew up in Florida and any moment below 75 is fall to me. Anyway, here's a sample:
I missed "I Keep a Diary" day over the weekend.
Ten ten ninety seven
Rock Springs Wyoming Hotel
As far as I can tell
I just don't miss you anymore
Yawn and the tears tear
Streams down the sink
You know what I think?
I can never yawn again
Come on so long move on
Anyway, I'll leave you with this newsletter's namesame. Thanks for reading, see ya next time.
My name is Jordy Walsh, and I’m a writer based in Philadelphia. I write about music for The Alternative and Slant Magazine. I Keep a Diary is a newsletter about music, books, writing, and probably a lot of vague emotions. You can follow me on Twitter for more thoughts on all that stuff and also a lot of pictures of my dog. Thanks for joining me.